The proposal requests support for the review and synthesis of several years of work on the social speech and social interaction of preschool children. The theoretical basis, the methods of observation and analysis, and the results of the studies of peer dyads will be elaborated and evaluated in a monograph-length work, which will also include a review of other current investigations of young children's use of language in potentially social situations. Specifically, the work will present structural and functional analyses of spontaneous dialogues in an attempt to specify some of the critical features of developing social competence. Types of features to be discussed (some of which have been explored in earlier studies) are 1) management of interpersonal relations, e.g. apportionment of turns at acting and speaking and techniques for initiating or maintaining contact; 2) differentiation of interpersonal states, e.g. play and nonplay orientations, and 3) conceptualizations of social acts, e.g., making a request for permission or providing an excuse.